Applications of liquid crystal spatial light modulators in optical communications

Advances in liquid crystal (LC) materials and VLSI technology have enabled the development of multi-phase spatial light modulators (SLM) that can perform high-resolution, dynamic optical beam positioning as well as temporal and spatial beam shaping in the 1550 nm optical communication window. These attractive features can effectively be used to achieve optical switching, optical spectral equalization, tunable optical filtering and many other functions that are important for future reconfigurable optical telecommunication networks. We review potential optical telecommunication applications based on LC-SLMs.